LLM-assisted programming has crossed the chasm. Across the IndieWeb I see skeptics either being won over or at least acknowledging the changes to our shared craft. Adam Levanthal calls the feeling Deep Blue. There’s little doubt that programming is undergoing an industrial revolution. Where we go from here is more up for debate.

You Are Here (Marc Brooker)

On the first road we can see this as the end to a craft we have loved. The slow end of programming as an economic discipline, as weaving, ploughing, and coopering went before. It is reasonable and rational to feel a sense of loss, and a sense of uncertainty. With the loss of the craft comes the loss of the economic moment where that craft was valued beyond nearly any other. Perhaps any other in history. It is irrational to feel denial. You are here.

I Started Programming When I Was 7. I’m 50 Now, and the Thing I Loved Has Changed (James Randall)

The feedback loop has changed. The intimacy has gone. The thing that kept me up at night for decades — the puzzle, the chase, the moment where you finally understand why something isn’t working — that’s been compressed into a prompt and a response. And I’m watching people with a fraction of my experience produce superficially similar output. The craft distinction is real, but it’s harder to see from the outside. Harder to value.

A programmer’s loss of a social identity (Dave Gauer)

Do I sound like a machine code programmer in the 1950s refusing to learn structured programming and compiled languages? I reject that comparison. I love a beautiful abstraction just as much as I love a good low-level trick.

If the problem is that we’ve painted our development environments into a corner that requires tons of boilerplate, then that is the problem. We should have been chopping the cruft away and replacing it with deterministic abstractions like we’ve always done. That’s what that Larry Wall quote about good programmers being lazy was about. It did not mean that we would be okay with pulling a damn slot machine lever a couple times to generate the boilerplate.

Code has always been the easy part (Kellan Elliott-McCrea)

We’ve always had this tension. We’ve always fetishized the act of writing code, the quality of the code, the code as the primary artifact and IP. And on the other hand successful teams have always known that the value is the system, the value is human-technology hybrid that allows a product to be delivered, meet customer needs, evolve to provide more value over time, meet the spoken and unspoken needs of the problem domain, etc. This confusion in our thinking has laid at the heart of why, for example, technical hiring was such a disaster for so long.

Travel agents took 10 years to collapse. Developers are 3 years in. (Martin Alderson)

The real value now lies in domain knowledge: understanding how systems connect, knowing which data exists where, and grasping what the business actually needs. I’ve had outrageously good results taking my knowledge of internal and external data sources and getting LLM agents to synthesise it all together. That kind of work isn’t going away: if anything, improvements in agentic coding mean you can do what would have required a team of 10 in what seems like a few afternoons.